In recent years hand-held calculators have become cheaper and more abundant, largely due to the development of cheap Large Scale Integrated circuits. These calculators are designed with a low power consumption compatible with battery power supplies. This design parameter has dictated that the calculators use low power readout devices, such as light emitting diodes, liquid crystal displays, and the like.
One feature of hand-held calculators which has been keenly lacking is a means of printing the calculator readout directly onto paper. This shortcoming is due to the power requirements of state of the art digital printing devices which are too large to be supported by the typical battery power supply. Since the calculator functions virtually without error, it is ironic that the greatest source of error is in mistakes in number input, and in manually transcribing the digital light display onto paper. A digital printout device compatible in size and power requirements with a hand-held calculator would aid significantly in reducing errors. Furthermore, the manual transcription process takes much more time than the milliseconds required for the actual calculation. A hand-held calculator with a printout capability would be many times faster than present devices.